A quota for rape

What equality? Tuesday’s shocker about the 12-year-old Mumbai girl being serially raped by her cousin and eight neighbours for over a year mocked all the media chatter that has assaulted us on the gender injustices which the women’s bill hopes to rectify.

Don’t ask me if 33% representation will also bring about a one-third reduction in assaults on women, the fastest growing crime in an India lusting to become an economic super stud. There is a rape every 34 minutes, which you could argue is an improvement on the fact that a woman is molested here every 26 minutes.

But don’t bother about passing on these statistics to the 12-year-old girl from a middle-class chawl in Mumbai’s boom suburb of Andheri. Correctly, the media has refrained from naming her. But we have bared the identity of everyone else, so the spirit of confidentiality has been well and truly molested. That’s another story.

This kid was a victim long before her cousin first put his filthy paws on her. Marriages do break up, but if her parents did not divorce till she was about eight, why did they shrug off responsibility for her when she was only nine months old, and leave her with her mother’s sister. The aunt did a good job of raising the child despite having to supply meals to make ends meet.

However, let’s not add that she ‘brought her up like her own children’, because that’s where the problem is. Her own son obviously hadn’t learnt anything about morality or basic humanity, because when he was 22 and his kid ‘sister’ a little over 10, he raped her. And then invited the neighbourhood to have a go at her. Whenever they felt the urge. The sordid club included a 71-year-old –and some of his mother’s clients. Pick up your tiffin, jump on the sexual gravy train.

Can you imagine the terror gripping 12-year-old child as she emerged each day from school in dread of one or the other of these monsters dragging her off to ‘lodges’ to satisfy their lust, before ‘considerately’ dropping her home. When she protested, they blackmailed her with MMS clips of their acts. Whose shame would it be?

What is more disquieting ? The facts of this case or that it is unique only in degree? Actually, something else should disturb us more. What’s even more numbing than the prolonged and multi-pronged sexual assault of so young a girl is her utter isolation. For well over a year, was everyone around struck blind and deaf? Could something as regular as this not be sensed? Were victim and rapists such consummate actors?

The cops are ‘all praise’ for the aunt; denial is an overpowering emotion, but surely she must have known? And what about the neighbours who are all now ‘shocked’ and self-righteously indignant? People are too nosey at the best of times and suddenly self-absorbed at the worst of times. It would have been too disruptive of the even tenor of everyone’s lives to discover why this child was being brought back by different men long after school hours. Was she skipping blithely all the way to her door?

We have heard often enough of terrible atrocities being inflicted in the privacy of middle-class flats. But tenements such as this one have a more open-door lifestyle.

Yes, the kindly ‘mausi’ looked after this parentally abandoned kid for 11 long years. But at the end of the day, did this girl child become every pervert’s plaything simply because she was nobody’s baby?

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Alec Smart said: “Should Modi actually appear before the special investigation team? Or will he become a SITting duck.”

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Thursday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. Bachi Karkaria also writes Giving Gyan in the Mumbai Mirror, and its fellow publications in other cities. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style.

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metr. . .